Ray-tracing the way to go for game developers?

TG Daily has interviewed Daniel Pohl, an engineer who is making some impressive progress in ray-tracing research, about Intel’s ray-tracing efforts.

Q: What is Larrabee from your perspective. What is the underlying architecture and the programming model?
A: Larrabee was primarily built as a rasterizering processor. Therefore you have support for DirectX and OpenGL. But it will also be a freely programmable x86-architecture. That means you could, for example, write your own rasterizer with your own API, a ray tracer, a voxel renderer or combinations of those. You could also use it for non-graphical applications that benefit from parallelization.

Q: What API is Intel using to showcase ray tracing demos?
A: We wrote our own API. The shading system uses a HLSL-like syntax that allows you also to shoot new rays within a shader. Using that API the programmer has no need to manually multi-thread the rendering and does not need to optimize the shading with SSE as this is done by the shading compiler automatically.